


Fin de Siècle

by Ginplusanything



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: 1900s Paris, Alternate Universe - Moulin Rouge! Fusion, F/M, M/M, but no promises, hopefully less tragic than it first appears, jughead is a starving artist, the moulin rouge au no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 09:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11620290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ginplusanything/pseuds/Ginplusanything
Summary: Love? Love? Above all things, I believe in love. Love is like oxygen. Love is a many-splendoured thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All we need is love.The Moulin Rouge.A night club. A dance hall. Ruled over by Archibald Andrews. A kingdom of night creatures, where the rich could come and play with the young and beautiful creatures of the underworld.The most beautiful of all these was the woman I thought I loved. A courtesan, known as Satine: she sold her love to men. They called her the Sparkling Diamond, and she was the star of the Moulin Rouge.The star of the Moulin Rouge is dead.





	Fin de Siècle

_Les Moulin Rouge  
1900_

_"Love? Love? Above all things, I believe in love. Love is like oxygen. Love is a many-splendoured thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All we need is love."_

There was a boy. A very strange, enchanted boy. They say he wandered very far, very far over land and sea. A little shy, and sad of eye. But very wise was he. And then one day, a magic day, he passed my way. And while we spoke of many things; fools and kings, this he said to me:

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love, to be loved in return.

\--

The Moulin Rouge. 

A night club. A dance hall. Ruled over by Archibald Andrews, a kingdom of night creatures, where the rich could come and play with the young and beautiful creatures of the underworld.  
The most beautiful of all these was the woman I thought I loved. A courtesan, known as Satine: she sold her love to men. They called her the Sparkling Diamond, and she was the star of the Moulin Rouge.   
The star of the Moulin Rouge is dead.

\--

I first came to Paris one year ago. It was 1899, the summer of love. I knew nothing of the Moulin Rouge, Archibald Andrews, or Satine. The world had been swept up in Bohemian Revolution, and I had been carried in the tide of it, all the way to Paris from New York, with only a typewriter and the clothes on my back to my name.

The Gare du Nord seems often as though it might contain every person in Paris. The sweeping arches of the newly redesigned station seem designed to echo and multiply every small sound, until the concourse is filled with deafening greeting and goodbye. It was June, and as soon as I left the train my hairline felt thick with the heat of the day, tightening the band of the grey top hat that was in danger of being tossed onto the railway line and disregarded entirely. Rue de Faubourg Saint-Denis was little better, but in my naiveté I was little affected by it. I had made it. Paris.

On the hill near Paris was the village of Montmartre. The centre of the Bohemian world, a never ending menagerie. They called them the Children of the Revolution.

I had come to write amongst these people, to craft and create and live a penniless existence. The room I found was pitiful, on the corner of Rue Blanche: the first month paid for by the dollars I had stolen from my father and changed to francs in the station. Wood panelled, with only a small bed in one corner and a desk by the window – I might have passed it by entirely, but for the large half-paned window which gazed out onto the wide street below, already flickering with electric light in the early dusk. It was a few floors up, with a view over the Boulevard de Clichy and the famous Moulin Rouge itself. At the time, I had barely a glance for it: before leaving I had sworn to my sister never to go there. That did not mean I could not sit on my flaking iron seat and observe. 

It was impossible to resist removing my typewriter from its travelling case as soon as I sat down. I removed a sheet of crisp paper from the sleeve in the side and entered it into the mechanism before sitting, poised to create sometime romantic within moments of being in the most romantic city in the world.

My fingers hovered expectantly. 

They hovered a little longer.

With a sigh, I removed the sheet of paper and closed over the lid. The issue was, I’d never been in love. How could I create, when I was such a fraud? What I needed was to explore; to escape the little room and absolve myself in the madness below my window.

I wandered down the rickety stairs and found myself quite by chance in the company of a group of young men and women. Serpents, they called themselves. The building I had made my lodging seemed to be full of them. One young man in particular, who introduced himself as Joaquin DeSantos, appeared willing to take me under his wing. On one arm a girl – spectacularly beautiful, and simultaneously the most terrifying person I’d ever met. She was a fellow American, a debutante who’d escaped the trappings of wealth and, from what I gathered, an unhappy marriage arrangement in New York to live the life of an artist. I was introduced to her as Veronique, but – “Call me Ronnie, darling, everyone does.” In return, I offered the nickname I had been given at a young age. Jughead. It was the first time in my life that no one in a room had questioned the name.

They were dreamers. Playwrights, actors, musicians, bonded by dire poverty and a love of the arts. The struggling artists. I had never felt quite so at home as the moment one of them handed me a lapel pin, emblazoned with a green snake, entwined between the amber legs of a fairy. It might have been vulgar were the artistry not beautiful. They were a family – more than any group of people I had previously encountered. Bound in their intention to create the greatest piece of theatre ever seen – a play Ronnie called, _Spectacular, Spectacular!_ A celebration of the values they held dearest: freedom, beauty, truth and, above all, love.

Joaquin, it transpired, was at the end of his tether in the construction of the piece. He considered himself a songwriter, rather than a poet. But these were the people I had come to find. I had barely uttered the words, “Perhaps I might be of assistance..?” and they had me in their rehearsal room. 

\--

The Moulin Rouge.

The place heaved with movement. My overwhelming first impression – how could one floor possibly hold so many? If the Gare du Nord thrummed with life, this exuded it. The room was sumptuous, dripping in silks and gilded accents. Above all of us was a chandelier, blazing with light over the crowd. The crowd mainly comprised gentlemen in their hats and tails, the very same outfit I had been placed in in order to sell my story as a young but successful American writer. The plan was this: I would read to the star of the Moulin Rouge my poetry, in the hope that her romantic tendencies might overwhelm her practical sensibility, convincing her boss and our financier to take a chance on an unknown playwright. The plan entertained me so much that it never crossed my mind to stick to my original intentions to never set foot in the place.

Liquid courage came from the Serpents in the form of my first absinthe. As green as their emblem, set on fire, with a cube of white sugar. It was syrupy and cloying on my tongue and set my throat on fire. I felt, rather than saw, my pupils dilate. The swirling noise of the Bohemian quarter and the wider city became visible, threads of light that carried conversation. I might have lain back by the window in my small room that looked out over the city, might have been content to lay there and watch the sound as it swept above me.

The second absinthe made me feel like I was floating, and the third was enough to get me into the Moulin Rouge.

The large space looked, to my hazily romantic eye, to be set alight by the electrical lighting. Of course I had been to theatres in New York – this was different. Every space was set alight, the electricity seeming to pulse through the crowd itself, illuminated by the lamps. 

The girls were something else. Vibrant, eclectic - spectacularly beautiful. I had scarcely before seen an ankle, and these had their skirts around their waists, their stockinged legs on full display. I could barely look away. They were sensual, the most alive I had ever seen anyone look. My companions were swept away in the crowd, but I could only watch. They were everywhere, moving through the crowd in one vastly choreographed imitation of a mating ritual. They sold themselves, sold their bodies and their love to the crowd of men. And the men were obsessed. I was obsessed.

And then at once, as if rehearsed, the crowd stopped, stilled, seemed to hold its breath. The large lime lights near the back of the auditorium lit, as the other electrics dimmed, their focus in the centre of the hall. From the corner of one eye, at the back of the hall I saw a slim figure illuminated just briefly by the flare of white light from their lamp, before being blinded my its full beam. I followed its focus, my addled mind drawn in by the beam of light. 

She was unlike any girl I had ever seen before. Her skin was luminescent in the light, long smooth legs extending from her corseted torso. She sparkled under the scrutiny of the light, radiating her glow over the entire room, deigning to grace us with her presence from on high. Her hair was smooth and silvery in the limelight, her face perfectly symmetrical, chiselled as if by the greatest of writers. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was overwhelmed with the urge to take up painting, that I might capture her. Every eye was on her. She drew them in, the flame to our moths. She was everything.

Joaquin was at my ear, “That’s her – Satine. The sparkling diamond.”

Ronnie was at my other side, “Her real name is Cooper. Betty, or – no, Polly Cooper.”

Both were fixated on her, every eye in the room unable to look anywhere else.

Across the room, a young man in evening dress, red haired, watched her most fervently of all. DeSantos whispered it in my ear: Andrews. The proprietor. Younger than expected, as entranced by his star as the rest of us. I could not have recalled anything her song contained. She was undoubtedly a star, but I found myself spellbound by the details: the way the light seemed to play off the costume which, upon closer inspection, was less perfect than it first appeared. She was stunning, her face cleverly painted into a version of perfection. She was undoubtedly more beautiful underneath it. Her arms were corded with muscle, in spite of her delicate frame. The vision of dainty perfection was, even then, perhaps more of an illusion than anyone realised.

Nonetheless she was captivating, her performance inspired. The song was trite, but she gave it purpose, her smoky melodic voice filled the auditorium. I do not believe a single person in the room deigned to breathe while she entertained us. The applause as she finished was raucous. Behind her, the lights returned to their previous state, the source of the lime light directly across from me cutting out sharply, that same slim figure visible once more out of the pool of light. 

She joined the crowd of dancers, and even amongst them she shone, vivacious and stunning. My newfound friends and I joined the fray without quite meaning to. Ronnie had produced the bottle of absinthe from who knew where, and had poured a measure into an abandoned champagne flute. It was in my hand before I knew it, and down my throat barely a moment later. I spluttered, but felt it fire through me, until the urge to join the melee became utterly overwhelming. I did not get near her. She was too surrounded, flitting through the crowd like the fairy on my lapel pin. I could not keep my eyes from straying back to her.

If I’d met her in that precise moment I would have told her I was in love with her. 

I could not have known then what the Sparkling Diamond would come to mean to me.

**Author's Note:**

> I have plans for this, and they are more ambitious than anything I have attempted before. Wish me luck!
> 
> If anyone feels like they want to beta, shoot me a comment. My self-editing is generally pretty poor. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this!


End file.
